January 11th, 2007, Xichang Space Centre, China.
Controllers follow a kill vehicle on track to intercept a defunct Feng Yun weather satellite. With flawless engineering, control, timing and targeting the missile blows said satellite into more than two thousand five hundred pieces ten centimetres or more in size, not to mention smaller killer particles, incrementing debris in Low Earth Orbit by forty percent or more, and there is more, a lot more, to come.
February 10th, 2009, Low Earth Orbit.
Cosmos 2251, a Russian signals satellite and Motorola’s Iridium 33 bump into each other between seven hundred and nine hundred kilometres above our heads converting themselves into, perhaps, more than one hundred thousand pieces of junk bigger than a centimetre in diameter, and there is more, a lot more, to come.
And I remember Mr Cerebrum saying, way back then, imitating the sardonic drawl of William S. Burroughs,
“Now that's what I call a reaal quiet orrgasm....”
February 25th, 2016, Pennsylvania, a backcountry road, The United States of America.
A real solid lump of a malfunctioning GPS satellite smashes into a horse drawn buggy pulled up just before a nearby intersection. Preacher Jakob never gets his pencil drawn map the right way around and his broad rimmed black hat is a real bloody mess, not to mention his last thoughts....
....That is that, and the horse glances nonchalantly sideways, a one eyed glance, and ambles, kind of bored, over to the nearest patch of juicy green roadside grass.
And I remember Mr Cerebrum saying, way back then, imitating the sardonic drawl of William S. Burroughs,
“Shame he hadn’t worked out beforehand, you know, with a little more attention to detail, in what the hell direction the sun rised in them there parts, coulda avoided a reeal baad headache....”
January 10th, 2025, South East England, on a backcountry road.
Breezing through the parched English countryside in my battered Daciaelectric Hydro*, hands free mobile and GPS systems hacked to send in erroneous, but believable, triangulations to whomsoever it might concern, breezing along, (that is, a breeze only from the air con fan turned up to its limit) listening to some nostalgic jazz tinged hard rock by The Blue Roadsters, and Mr Cerebrum and I, in one of those mutual moments that need no words and have no explanation, decide to switch to a crackly sounding DAB news broadcast just in time to hear,
“....Mars Project Way Station disintegrates in low earth orbit. Scientific speculation has it that the Way Station was struck by part, or parts of a reactor from one of thirty two ancient Russian radar tracking satellites that itself had recently been nudged out of its previous orbit by debris from an unknown source impossible to track back....Fifteen lives lost....Well over half a million additional sizeable pieces of orbital space junk calculated added to LEO debris....”
And Mr Cerebrum, as he is want to do, switches to imitation mode. Robert De Nero (Anyone remember ever downloading one of his?) as Mafiosi Government Criminal, but the content is Burroughs, William S. Burroughs,
“What are you here for? We’re all here to go. That’s what we’re all here for. Earth is going to be a space station and we’re here to go. Into space. That’s what we are here for. Do I hear any questions about that?”
*The last private (non military/police) transportation vehicle built by deviants in the European Sector of The Alliance of Civilisations, not by reconditioned non terminal rendition prisoners in The Muslim Federation.
